Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> Lighten up, Jed. It can take a long time for a book to appear. I doubt it. The book was published this year, and nowadays books can be written and published very quickly. It is a short book. > Should he have intervened? Why? The book, *as it is*, is a positive force > for the encouragement of cold fusion research. Oh come now. If this technically illiterate nonsense is the best we can hope for after 21 years, it will take another 100 years. > That he showed up a U. Missouri is a huge step; compare this with the > pseudoskeptics, Jed. No, he wasn't there, as far as I know. Plus, I am sure Scaramuzzi told him about the ENEA-sponsored ICCF-15 conference years ago. He described Scaramuzzi as a lone hold-out, barely tolerated at the ENEA. I will grant, many of the Italians at the ENEA have described themselves that way, but Goodstein should have at least mentioned that there are many others in the ENEA doing cold fusion and that the organization is sponsoring a conference, along with the Italian Physical Society and Chemical Society. That negates his description of the field, and his assertion that "nothing much has changed." The only thing that hasn't changed is the ignorant refusal of people like him to look at the facts. > Maybe you should have a talk with him, but I'd suggest calming down first! I wouldn't give him the time of day. > "Travesty" is pretty dramatic. > It's not a travesty . . . It darn well is in my estimation. A disgrace, a travesty, a joke, and a violation of academic ethics. He wrote a whole a chapter in a book about a scientific subject without reading a single paper on it, and he grossly misrepresented it and wrote a fantasy instead of a fact-based description. In a book about academic ethics! How ironic. This guy has no business lecturing others about academic ethics or fraud. I would not go so far as to call his book fraud, but it stinks. Look, to connect with those holding the common opinion, you must appear to > be with them, at first. I have no desire to connect with such people. I want to steamroll them. Push them out of the way. There are only two outcomes to this debate: either the ignorant, bigoted, technically illiterate fools like Goodstein will win, or we will win. If we win, the the whole world will see them for what they are. They will go down in history as a laughingstock, like the fools who denounced the Wright brothers. If they win, we will be forgotten, and potential benefit of cold fusion will be lost to the human race. That's reproduction, just not exact reproduction, it's reproduction of a > different kind, confirming process evidence. Would you look at that? > Goodstein would not recognize experimental confirmation if it bit him on the butt! He is like Taubes; completely unqualified to even discuss this subject. I mean, give us a break! He wrote a book describing how you load palladium into platinum. That's like Taubes with his 50 deg C temperature difference in liquid, or Hoffman with his used CANDU reactor moderator water being sold retail. People who publish such egregious mistakes in books disqualify themselves from serious consideration. The publishers should have tossed the manuscripts into the trash. Look, everyone makes mistakes. You can find minor errors in any book. (I can, anyway.) I can even forgive a British author who thought that Harvard University was established after 1814 (R. Holmes, p. 482). But people who devote entire chapters -- or books! -- to preposterous nonsense are beyond the pale. > It's basic communication technique. Start with agreement. Where would you > start, Jed? With "You're crazy!" How well does that work? Has it ever > worked? Once? > I don't say he is crazy. I say he is ignorant and wrong. This will never "work" in the sense of winning him over or convincing him, but such people cannot be convinced. It is a waste of time trying to convince them. I have no desire to convince them. I want to push them out of the way by showing the world that they have no credibility. - Jed
